Business Resolutions for 2016: Cut Costs

Making a profit in your business depends on two essential elements—sales and operating costs. Of course, you already know this, just as you know that you can’t always have total control over the number of sales your company gets in a month. But you know what you do have control over? The costs of operating your business.

Of course, there are always going to be unavoidable costs; that’s the hard truth of owning a business. However, you can do a lot to cut down on your business’s regular operating costs with a few simple changes. We’d like to offer you a few tips for doing just that, so you can successfully cut costs this year.

Proper Scheduling

If you employ more than just a handful of people, payroll likely makes up a large portion of your business’s expenses. It is therefore extremely important that you try to minimize payroll costs as much as possible. Of course, you don’t want to pass out pay cuts, and you likely can’t afford to reduce the number of workers in your employ. Instead, you will have to rely on careful, purposeful scheduling of your employees.

For the sake of example, let’s say you run a retail store. It’s become apparent that you have very few customers on Monday and Tuesday mornings, but you still have three employees working in the store at that time. This means that your workers are spending most of their time idling, waiting for a customer to walk in, which in turn means that you are paying your employees for non-productive work.

If you can pay attention to these sorts of scheduling issues, you can correct the problem and save yourself on payroll costs. In this example, you could simply change the schedule so that you only have two employees in the store during those slower morning hours. Assuming that employee makes $10 an hour, that saves you $200 per week in wages; you can imagine how this can quickly add up to big savings for your company.

Minimizing Supply Costs

How much money does your office spend on ink, paper, toner, notepads, and file storage space every month? If you don’t already know, perhaps you should start tracking those costs to determine how much you can cut back. Don’t think you can cut back on those supplies? Well, we can show you how.

Document management software alone can drastically reduce your reliance on paper and paper-related supplies like ink and toner. Plus, you can eliminate most, if not all, of your existing paper documents, which means you no longer need those filing cabinets. If you were paying for extra storage space for your files, that can be a huge savings cost for you, or you can convert the storage space into additional storage for your products and inventory.

Of course, even once you implement a DMS, you will need to make some adjustments in your office to ensure that you are cutting back on your supplies as much as is feasible. Encourage your employees to take notes on laptops instead of on paper. Ask them to share document electronically instead of passing out physical copies. These and other such changes in your office can help to save your company money.

Our business efficiency experts can also help you to develop a paperless, more cost-effective way of running your business. So fill out the form on this page and speak to one of our representatives to see how we can help you cut costs and meet your business’s New Year’s resolution.